Lying Phillip Schofield has played the supportive women in his life for mugs – they must feel like doormats
SURVEYING the wreckage of Phillip Schofield’s career, I couldn’t help thinking about what the writer Mary McCarthy once said about the playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie — including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Now disgraced for lying about a sexual relationship with a young male employee, Schofield’s recollections vary so much that had he stayed at This Morning, viewers would have been looking out of the window to make sure it wasn’t in fact Last Night.
This relationship was an open secret — which only the might of Schofield’s lawyers stopped newspapers from revealing.
His life has been one lie after another. First he masqueraded for two decades as a straight, happily-married dad of two daughters.
Then he felt he must follow his heart and “come out” as gay on live TV — but still as such a blameless man that he was supported by both his wife and colleague Holly Willoughby.
We know Schofield met the young man when he was a teenager. But what don’t we know?
Lying-wise, the sky would appear to be the limit for the slippery “Schofe”, who sheds personas the way a snake sheds dead skin.
And what a lot of trust he has betrayed along the way — of his bosses at ITV, yes, but they only protected him because he was their cheeky little cash-cow.
The minute the revenue looked likely to dry up, so did the milk of human kindness.
More objectionably, Schofield has utterly played for mugs the women in his life — his actual wife of decades, Stephanie Lowe, and his gruesomely-named “sofa-wife” Holly, now a marriage of inconvenience which has been drawn to a swift sundering.
The word “supportive” comes up over and over again.
Holly supported Phil, Stephanie supported Phil, Holly supported Stephanie.
But what actually happened is that Stephanie and Holly assisted Schofield in the prancing pantomime that was his private life until it all came tumbling down.
Now he’s slunk off to seek yet more support from yet another woman — his poor old mum, who must still be reeling from her other son being recently convicted and jailed for sexually assaulting a teenage boy.
Schofield has used women basically as emotional support pets all his life — weeping on their shoulders all the way to the bank and then being called “brave” for doing so, even though being a gay man in showbusiness is about as brave as being a cook in a kitchen.
Now those who supported Schofield must feel like doormats — the speed with which the rug has been whipped out from under his feet has been breathtaking as every fawner and flatterer distances themselves.
ITV, which previously hinted they’d employ him to do other work such as the British Soap Awards (let’s hope he’s at least nominated for Best Male Dramatic Performance as a decent human being) have washed their slippery hands of him while his talent agency YMU have dropped him after 35 years.
And due to his whole selling point — being likeable — there’s no comeback for this career.
Rightly or wrongly, great talent bestows a sexual hall-pass — no one cares that Picasso put it about so much, or that Dickens was in love with his wife’s sister.
But if you’re a “personality” — a bit of a wrong word when applied to the talking heads of morning TV — you depend solely on being liked.
Being decent, to use an old-fashioned word.
This is the downfall of a mediocre little man who wanted to be loved “for himself” and to be paid a packet for the privilege.